Street Style

An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging

Brent Luvaas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780857855756
• eBook ISBN: 9781474262903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Fashion Design
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2019 John Collier Jr Award Street style blogging has experienced a meteoric rise in popularity over the last decade. Amateur photographers, often with no formal training in fashion, have become critical arbiters of taste and trends, influencing the representations that appear in magazines and on runways, and putting new cities on the fashion world map. This cutting-edge book documents the evolution of street style photography, from the fieldwork photos of early anthropology to the glamorized snapshots that appear on blogs today, and explores the structural shifts in the global fashion industry that street style has helped bring about. Chronicling author and anthropologist Brent Luvaas' experience over three years of blogging through vivid street imagery and rich ethnographic detail, this book turns the lens of street style photography back onto anthropology itself, arguing that the phenomenon is a powerful mode of amateur ethnography. Bloggers blur the distinction between professional and amateur, insider and outsider, self and brand. This book documents that blur from the ground level-from the streets of Philadelphia to the sidewalks of New York Fashion Week. Street Style is an essential read for students and scholars of fashion, anthropology, sociology, media and cultural studies, and fans of street style photography alike.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Anthropology, Street Style
• 1. On ‘The Street’: A Conceptual History of Street Style Photography
• 2. Travelling the Street Style Blogosphere: Amateur Anthropology from Around the Globe
• 3. Style Radar: On Becoming a Street Style Blogger and Knowing Whom to Shoot
• 4. The Subject(s) of Street Style: Street Portraits as Fashion Singularities
• 5. The Business of Blogging: Free Labour, Freelancing, and Free Stuff
• 6. Scene from the Sidewalk: Shooting Street Style at New York Fashion Week
• Conclusion: Straight Up, Redux
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint